As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. An option is an Information Handling System (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, global communications, etc. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
An IHS may have one or more processors, and each processor may include a cache. A cache is a volatile memory that needs energy in order to maintain stored data. During operation of a processor, data read from main memory may be cached to reduce the access time of frequently read data, and write data destined to main memory may be cached to reduce the latency of write operations and to eliminate main memory operations for data that may be modified frequently. Until the write data contents of a cache are moved to main memory, that data is said to be “dirty,” because the cache contains a more up-to-date copy of the data than the main memory contents for a specific system memory address. Ordinarily, in case of a power outage affecting the IHS, all “dirty” cache data is lost in addition to the contents of all volatile main memory.